Context sensitivity in the spelling of English vowelsq

Context sensitivity in the spelling of English vowelsq

Rebecca Treiman,* Brett Kessler, and Suzanne Bick

Psychology Department, Wayne State University, 71 W. Warren Ave., Detroit, MI 48202, USA

Received 27 July 2001; revision received 26 September 2001

Abstract

Statistical analyses of English sound-to-spelling correspondences (Kessler & Treiman, 2001) show

that vowel spellings become more predictable, in some cases, when the preceding and following con-

sonants are taken into account. In four experiments, we asked whether adult spellers are sensitive to

such associations. We found evidence for sensitivity to associations involving both preceding and fol-

lowing consonants when examining adults� spellings of vowels in nonwords (Experiments 1 and 2) and

their substitution errors on vowels in real words (Experiment 3). The results show that phoneme-to-

grapheme mapping is sensitive to a broader array of context than just rime context. Additional findings

suggest that the context must be within the same syllable to be influential (Experiment 4). To the extent

that rimes play a special role in spelling, this role may derive from the fact that associations between

vowels and codas are more common in English than associations between vowels and onsets, not from

spellers� greater sensitivity to within-rime associations. � 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights

reserved.

Keywords: Spelling; Sound-to-spelling correspondence; Vowels; Syllables; Rimes

To be literate, one must know how to read

words and how to spell them. There has been a

great deal of research on how adults derive the

pronunciations of written words in reading. This

topic is of particular interest because people who

are literate in an alphabetic writing system can

pronounce not only words they have seen before

but also words they encounter for the first time.

For instance, a reader who has never seen the

word glebe will probably pronounce it, correctly,

as /glib/. This ability shows that knowledge about

the spelling-to-sound relationships of the lan-

guage is represented, in some way, in the mind of

the reader. Researchers have studied the nature of

this knowledge by examining people�s pronuncia-

tions of nonwords (e.g., Andrews & Scarratt,

1998). They have also examined mispronuncia-

tions of real words to gain further insight into the

processes used in spelling-to-sound translation.

For example, the fact that great is occasionally

mispronounced as =g rit= in speeded pronuncia-

tion tasks has been interpreted to mean that

readers use their knowledge of the most common

pronunciation of ea, /i/ (e.g., Glushko, 1979).

Journal of Memory and Language 47 (2002) 448–468

www.academicpress.com

Journal ofMemory and

Language

qThis research was supported by NSF Grant SBR-

9807736. Helpful comments were provided by Michael

McCloskey, two anonymous reviewers, and audiences at

the University of Massachusetts and Haskins Labora-

tories.* Corresponding author. Present address: Psychology

Department, Washington University, Campus Box 1125,

One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899. Fax:

+314-935-7588.

E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Trei-

man).

0749-596X/02/$ - see front matter � 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.

PII: S0749-596X(02 )00010-4

mail to: [email protected]

Our abilities in spelling are no less impressive

than our abilities in reading. A person who has

heard a piece of land referred to as a glebe but

who has never seen the word in print might spell it

as glebe, gleeb, or gleab. Only one of these options

is correct, but all three of them reveal the speller�sknowledge about the sound-to-letter mappings of

English. Although many studies have investigated

adults� knowledge and use of spelling-to-sound

relationships in English and other alphabetic

writing systems, relatively few studies have inves-

tigated sound-to-spelling translation. Likewise,

there is much less modeling work on spelling than

on reading. The goal of the present study was to

gain further information about adults� knowledge

of English sound-to-spelling relationships, infor-

mation that can help constrain models of the

spelling process and provide a foundation for

studies of how this knowledge is acquired.

Of particular interest, in this study, is the

spelling of vowels. In English, the spellings of

vowel phonemes are more variable than the

spellings of consonants (e.g., Kessler & Treiman,

2001). Likewise, adults make more substitution

errors on vowels than on consonants (e.g., Fi-

scher, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1985). We ask

how knowledge of sound–spelling relationships is

represented for vowels and whether adults use

information about the neighboring consonants to

facilitate their spelling of vowels. Does conso-

nantal context influence the spelling of vowels? If

so, which aspects of the context are important?

Studies that have shown a special bond be-

tween the vowel and the following consonant(s) of

an English syllable provide a tentative answer to

the question of which aspects of context may in-

fluence vowel spelling. The link between a vowel

and the following consonant is often formalized

by saying that the vowel and the consonant (or

coda) belong to the rime constituent of the syllable

(e.g., Fudge, 1969). The initial consonant or

cluster is thought to belong to a separate con-

stituent of the syllable, the onset. Evidence for an

onset–rime division of the English syllable comes

from several sources. For example, English

speakers prefer to divide syllables at the onset–

rime boundary in metalinguistic tasks (e.g., Trei-

man, 1983), and these units play a role in memory

for speech (e.g., Treiman & Danis, 1988a) and

phonological organization (e.g., Kessler & Trei-

man, 1997). Also, people appear to use letter

groups that correspond to the rimes of spoken

syllables when translating from print to speech. A

number of studies have found evidence that these

units are influential in reading, together with evi-

dence that onset + vowel sequences are less influ-

ential (e.g., Taraban & McClelland, 1987;

Treiman, Mullennix, Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-

Welty, 1995; Treiman & Zukowski, 1988). Rime

units play a role in several theories of printed

word recognition (e.g., Zorzi, Houghton, & But-

terworth, 1998). Given the importance of rimes in

phonological processing and reading, one might

expect them to play a special role in spelling. In

this view, a given vowel may be spelled differently

when it occurs before certain codas than when it

occurs before other codas. The preceding conso-

nant should not have an effect, as it belongs to a

separate constituent of the syllable. According to

this rime constituency hypothesis, people weigh the

spelling options for a given phoneme according to

the rime context in which the phoneme appears.

Treiman and Zukowski (1988) found evidence

for the rime constituency hypothesis in a series of

experiments with college students. In one study,

participants were asked to spell nonwords such as

=tSend= and =f reh=. Of interest was how often

people used the ie spelling of =e=, which is found

only in the real word friend. Spellings with ie were

more common for nonwords such as =tSend=,which shares its rime with friend, than for non-

words such as =f reh=, which shares its onset and

vowel with friend. In another study, participants

rated chiend as a reasonably good spelling of

=tSend=, giving it higher marks than frieth as a

spelling of =f reh=. These results suggest that the

spelling of a medial vowel is affected by the

identity of the coda but not by the identity of

the onset and that rimes play a special role in the

spelling of English. However, the effects observed

in this study were relatively small.

Barry and Seymour (1988), unlike Treiman

and Zukowski (1988), found no evidence for a

special role of rimes in spelling production. Barry

and Seymour looked at nonwords such as /ten/,

for which the most common spelling of the vowel

in the nonword�s rime (ai) is not the most common

spelling of the vowel overall (a followed by final

e). They compared such items to nonwords such

as =dut=, for which the most common spelling of

the vowel in the particular rime (oo) is also the

most common spelling overall. In both cases,

participants tended to produce the vowel spelling

that was most common in the lexicon as a whole.

There was no significant difference between the

two types of nonwords in this regard, although

there was a trend in the direction of a rime effect.

Barry and Seymour (p. 26) concluded, on the basis

R. Treiman et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 47 (2002) 448–468 449

of these results, that ‘‘subjects . . . utilize sound-to-

spelling contingencies abstracted from the lexicon

as a whole rather than only from the subset of

rhyming words to generate their nonword spell-

ings.’’ That is, people store and use information

about the frequencies of various spelling options

for each phoneme; these frequencies are global

(reflecting how the phoneme is spelled in all rimes)

rather than local (reflecting how the phoneme is

spelled in particular rimes). However, the analysis

that led to this conclusion was post hoc and in-

volved a fairly small number of items.

Perry, Ziegler, and Coltheart (2002) seconded

the idea that spelling production involves pri-

marily phoneme units, not rime-based units.

These investigators designed a series of experi-

ments to investigate the effects of rime context in

spelling. Some of the nonwords in the experiments

were similar to those analyzed by Barry and

Seymour (1988) in that one of the phonemes in the

rime was generally spelled one way in that par-

ticular rime but a different way in the lexicon as a

whole. An example from the Perry et al. study is /

skof/, where /o/ is usually spelled as o followed by

final e but is more often spelled as oa in /of/. For

another type of nonword, also similar to a type

analyzed by Barry and Seymour, the most com-

mon spelling of the grapheme in the particular

rime was the most common spelling overall. An

example is /plem/, where a followed by final e is

the most common overall spelling of /e/ and also

its most common spelling in /em/. Perry et al. in-

cluded a third type of nonword for which the rime

had two spellings that were roughly equal in fre-

quency but one spelling of the critical phoneme

was more common overall than the other. With

=tSin=, for example, -ean and -een are roughly

similar in frequency but ea is the most common

spelling of /i/ in all rimes.

In one experiment, Perry et al. (2002) asked

participants to spell the nonwords using the first

reasonable spelling that came to mind. This

spelling production task is similar to that of Barry

and Seymour (1988). Participants in this experi-

ment generally used the most common overall

spelling for the phoneme. This tendency was only

weakly modified by the frequency of the pho-

neme�s spelling in the particular rime in that the

difference among the three types of nonwords was

significant by subjects but not by items. Perry et

al. interpreted their results to mean that adults

generally use correspondences at the level of single

phonemes and single graphemes in spelling pro-

duction. These correspondences do not take rime

context into account. Perry et al. found clear ev-

idence for use of rimes in other tasks, such as

judging which of two spellings was more wordlike.

However, their conclusion with regard to spelling

production was that in general, adults use pho-

neme–grapheme sized relationships when spelling

nonwords.

So far, then, the results concerning the rime

constituency hypothesis are mixed. One study of

adults� spelling production (Treiman & Zukowski,

1988) found evidence for this hypothesis but two

studies (Barry & Seymour, 1988; Perry et al.,

2002) did not. Results on this issue have impor-

tant implications for models of spelling. One ap-

proach is a dual-route view (e.g., Barry &

Seymour, 1988; Kreiner & Gough, 1990). In this

view, lexical knowledge and nonlexical knowledge

provide two different routes to spelling. Within

this framework, it is important to determine

whether the nonlexical route is best characterized

in terms of associations between individual pho-

nemes and individual graphemes that are not af-

fected by the phoneme�s context or in terms of

associations that involve larger units and/or that

are sensitive to context. Single-route models,

based on connectionist principles, provide another

potential way to model spelling production (e.g.,

Olson & Caramazza, 1994). Depending on their

structure, such models can handle various types of

contextual effects. Behavioral data on whether

context effects occur and whether rime context is

particularly important will provide essential in-

formation for the development of spelling models.

An understanding of context effects in adult

spelling production should have important impli-

cations, as well, for our understanding of how

children learn to cope with the English writing

system. The system is complex, and simple pho-

neme-to-grapheme rules often yield incorrect

spellings. This is especially true for vowels, which

cause particular difficulty for English learners

(e.g., Treiman, 1993). If adults attempt to cope

with the variability of vowel spelling by learning

how vowels are spelled in particular environ-

ments, when and how does this ability develop?

Some researchers (e.g., Goswami, 1988) have

suggested that children use rime units from an

early age, whereas others (e.g., Frith, 1985) claim

that larger units are used only later in develop-

ment. Information about adults� spelling produc-

tion provides a foundation for studies of children.

Rimes may play a special role in English

spelling and reading because of their status as

phonological units. Alternatively, or in addition,

450 R. Treiman et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 47 (2002) 448–468

the nature of the English writing system may

make rimes particularly useful. Evidence on this

issue comes from Kessler and Treiman (2001),

who analyzed the sound–spelling relationships in

virtually all of the monosyllabic, monomorphemic

words of English that are familiar to college stu-

dents. They asked whether the spelling of a pho-

neme in one position of the syllable—onset, vowel,

or coda—is significantly affected by the other

constituents of the syllable. The results showed

that sound-to-letter relations are more variable

for vowels than for consonants. However, the

coda has a strong and significant influence on the

spelling of the vowel, with almost all English

vowels showing some associations of this kind.

For example, =e= is more likely to be spelled as ea

when followed by /d/ than when followed by other

consonants. If spellers take advantage of such

associations, vowel spelling becomes more pre-

dictable than it would otherwise be, though by no

means perfectly regular. Kessler and Treiman

found that the onset has a reliable influence on

vowel spelling as well. However, the effect of the

onset on the vowel is weaker overall than the effect

of the coda on the vowel, and onset effects are

only found in some cases.

The results of Kessler and Treiman (2001)

document the patterns of sound-to-spelling asso-

ciation in English monosyllabic words, showing

what patterns are available for use. In the present

study, we ask whether spellers take advantage of

these statistical patterns. Coda-to-vowel associa-

tions were examined in Experiment 1. When

spelling medial vowels in nonwords, do college

students take account of the coda in those cases

for which Kessler and Treiman found a significant

association between vowel and coda? According

to the rime constituency hypothesis, the answer to

the question should be ‘‘yes.’’ Experiment 2 ad-

dressed a similar question for onset-to-vowel as-

sociations. If rimes play a special role in spelling,

as the rime constituency hypothesis claims, then

spellers may not be sensitive to associations that

cross the onset–rime boundary. Experiment 3 ex-

tended the investigation to real words, and Ex-

periment 4 was designed to shed further light on

the linguistic domain over which context has its

effects.

Experiment 1

In this experiment, we asked whether adults�spellings of medial vowels in nonwords are

affected by the identity of the coda. Is the same

vowel transcribed differently when it occurs in

certain contexts—those for which Kessler and

Treiman (2001) documented a significant coda-to-

vowel association—than when it occurs in other

contexts? Such differences are expected according

to the rime constituency hypothesis. Six cases of

coda conditioning were chosen for study. We se-

lected cases in which spelling variations reflect the

identity of the coda (e.g., head vs hem) rather than

the presence versus absence of a coda (e.g., date vs

day).

Table 1 provides information about the six

cases that we investigated. In each case, we iden-

tified two contrasting environments such that a

particular spelling of a vowel, henceforth called

the critical spelling, occurs more often in one case

than the other. Consider Case 1, which involves

the vowel =e=. The critical spelling of this vowel,

ea, is found more often when =e= is followed by

/d/—the experimental context—than when =e= is

followed by /b/, =dZ=, /g/, /k/, /p/, and =tS=—the

control context. In the experimental context, as

Table 1 shows, =e= is spelled as ea in 43% of the

familiar monosyllabic, monomorphemic words

studied by Kessler and Treiman (2001). The con-

trol context was defined so as to minimize the

number of critical spellings, and in this context

=e= is never spelled as ea in the monosyllabic

words analyzed by Kessler and Treiman. Given

the patterns in English monosyllabic words, there

is thus a clear difference between how =e= is

spelled in the experimental context and the con-

trol context. Experiment 1 was designed to de-

termine whether adult spellers are sensitive to this

statistical difference.

Kessler and Treiman�s (2001) analysis of

sound–spelling relationships was limited to

monosyllabic words. All of the nonwords in the

present experiment are monosyllabic, but knowl-

edge derived from experience with polysyllabic

words might affect people�s spelling of monosyl-

lables. To determine whether the statistics are

similar when a larger sample of words is exam-

ined, we examined the spelling of each vowel

phoneme under investigation in a larger sample of

familiar words that included the final syllables of

polysyllables as well as monosyllables. This and

the other reported counts that include polysylla-

bles are based on the words in two machine-

readable dictionaries (Ward, 1993; Weide, 1995);

we eliminated words that are likely to be unknown

to our student population and we counted each

morpheme once, even if it appeared in more than


one word. As Table 1 shows, the percentage of ea

spellings in the experimental context in the larger

set was 40%, similar to the 43% obtained for

monosyllabic words. In the larger set, again, =e= is

never spelled as ea in the control context.

Once the experimental and control contexts

were defined, we constructed one set of monosyl-

labic nonwords in which =e= appeared in the ex-

perimental context and a matched set of

monosyllabic nonwords in which =e= appeared in

the control context. Sample items are shown in

Table 1. According to the rime constituency hy-

pothesis, spellers should be more likely to use ea

in the experimental nonwords than the control

nonwords.

The logic was similar for the other five cases.

The vowel in Case 2 was /i/. The most common

spelling of this vowel in medial position is ea, as in

beam. In words that end with /d/ and /p/, however,

ee as in reed and deep outnumbers ea. Before

certain other consonants—the control contexts

listed in Table 1—the critical ee spelling is much

less common. In Case 3, the vowel was /o/. In

medial position, it is most often spelled with o

followed by silent final e, as in bone. Before /l/,

however, bare o as in toll and control is fairly

common. Case 4 involved the vowel =u=. When

stressed, it is often spelled as u between a labial

onset and the coda /l/, /s/, =S=, or =tS=. Examples

are full, puss, bush, and butch. Before /f/ and /k/,

oo is the typical spelling, as in book and hoof. The

vowel examined in Case 5 was =au=. This vowel is

usually spelled as ow before final /l/ and /n/, as in

howl and clown. In the control contexts listed in

Table 1, ou is the more common spelling. The final

case was that of =ai=. Before /t/, igh as in bright

and right is fairly common. In the control con-

texts, i followed by final e is more typical.

In most of the cases described above, multiple

spellings for a single phoneme in present-day

English result from a sound change that occurred

after the English spelling system crystallized. For

example, bread and bred were originally pro-

nounced differently, as reflected in the spellings.

Later, a sound change in the former word caused

the two words to be pronounced alike, but the

spellings were not updated. Sound changes have

not always occurred in the same ways in all parts

of the English-speaking world, but for this and the

following experiments we tried to select patterns

that would apply to most dialects of English. In

Case 5 (=au=), the spelling variation does not re-

flect a sound change, but is related to the fact that

=au= is typically spelled as ow in syllable-finalTable

1

Case

inwhich

vowel

spellingis

affected

byco

dain

theword

sofEnglish

Case

1:=e=

Case

2:/i/

Case

3:/o/

Case

4:=u=

Case

5:=au=

Case

6:=a

i=

Followingco

ntextfo

rex

perim

ental

nonword

s

/d/

/d/,

/p/

/l/

=l=;=s=;=S=;=tS=

/l/,

/n/

/t/

Followingco

ntextfo

rco

ntrol

nonword

s

=b=;=d

Z=;=g

=;

=k=;=p

=;=tS=

=ð=;=g

=;=m=;

=st=;=h

==b

=;=d

=;=ð

=;=f=,

/g/,

/k/,

/n/,

/p/,

=t=;=tS=

=f=;=k

==d

Z=;=s=;=tS=

/b/,

/d/,

/f/,

/s/,

/v/,

/z/

Sample

experim

entalnonword

=kled=

=S

r ip=

/dwol/

=juS=

=maul=

=d

r ait=

Sample

controlnonword

=kleb=

=S

r ig=

/dwot/

=juf=

=mautS=

=d

r aib=

Critica

lvowel

spelling

eaee

o,no

followinge

uow

igh

Pro

portion

realword

swith

critical

spelling,ex

perim

entalco

ntexta

.43(.40)

.74(.64)

.36(.33)

.88(.73)

.88(.89)

.54(.39)

Pro

portion

realword

swith

critical

spelling,co

ntrolco

ntexta

.00(.00)

.14(.15)

.00(.00)

.00(.00)

.00(.00)

.00(.00)

aThefirstvalueis

basedonth

efamiliarmonosy

llabic

word

sfrom

Kessler

andTreim

an(2001);th

eseco

ndvalueis

basedonth

efinalsy

llablesoffamiliarword

s,polysy

llabic

aswellasmonosy

llabic.See

textfo

rdetails.


position and ou elsewhere. For reasons that are

unclear, the ow spelling also occurs in medial

position before /l/ and /n/.

Method

Stimuli. We constructed 10 pairs of experi-

mental and control nonwords for each of our six

cases. The nonwords in each pair contained the

same onset and the same vowel; they differed only

in the coda. All of the nonwords were phonolog-

ically legal in English. Sample stimuli for each

case are shown in Table 1. In addition to the 60

experimental and 60 control stimuli, there were 20

filler nonwords. The fillers included some vowel

and consonant phonemes that did not appear in

the experimental and control stimuli, and they

had a wider range of syllable structures. The in-

clusion of the fillers increased the variety among

the stimuli and decreased the repetitiveness of the

list. A complete list of the stimuli appears in the

Appendix.

Three different orders were prepared for pur-

poses of presentation. In each order, the experi-

mental items, control items, and fillers were

randomly intermixed with the constraint that no

more than two consecutive items had the same

onset, vowel, or coda.

Procedure. The participants were tested indi-

vidually or in small groups. Each individual or

group was quasi-randomly assigned to one of the

three orders. The participants were told that they

would be asked to spell a series of ‘‘made-up

words.’’ They were asked to pretend that these

were ordinary, everyday words of English and to

spell each item the way they thought it would be

spelled it if were a real word. This instruction was

designed to counteract any tendency people may

have to assume that unfamiliar words are foreign

and should therefore be spelled with atypical

patterns. The experimenter pronounced each item

and the participants repeated it. If a participant

did not repeat an item correctly, the experimenter

said it again and the participant was asked to say

it again. The participants then spelled the item on

prepared answer sheets. A rest break was given

halfway through the list.

Participants. For this and the following ex-

periments, we tested students at Wayne State

University who were native speakers of English

and who reported no history of speech, hearing,

or reading disorders. The students in this and the

following studies participated as volunteers or in

exchange for extra credit. Of the 26 such students

tested for Experiment 1, data from four students

were not analyzed because three or more of their

spellings of the 20 filler items were not plausible

renditions of the item�s phonemic structure. Ex-

amples of these implausible spellings are zaspa for

/væsp/ and swonith for =S c

in=. These students may

have had unacknowledged spelling problems or

may not have been paying full attention to the

task. The latter is a potential problem given that

Experiment 1, unlike the following experiments,

was run at the end of a semester when students are

likely to be tired and overworked. When scoring

filler spellings as plausible or implausible for this

and the following experiments, we considered

spellings that were appropriate in any context to

be plausible. For example, knith for =naið= was

considered plausible because /n/ is spelled as kn in

some words and =ai= is spelled with single i in

some contexts. We accepted reasonable di-

alect-based variations. The 22 participants whose

data were analyzed for Experiment 1 produced a

mean of 0.82 implausible spellings of the 20 filler

items.

Results and discussion

Table 2 shows the mean number of critical

spellings for the vowels in the experimental and

control nonwords. For each vowel, we carried out

t tests by subjects and by items to determine

whether there were significantly more critical

spellings for the experimental items than the

control items. As Table 2 shows, the difference

between experimental and control items was reli-

able by subjects for all cases. By items, the dif-

ference was significant for all but Case 4 (=u=),where it was marginal. For each case, we also

calculated the number of participants and the

number of item pairs for which a difference in the

predicted direction was found. These data, pre-

sented in Table 2, show substantial differences in

the predicted direction for all but Case 4. Given

that certain rimes were repeated across the ex-

periment, we also examined participants� re-

sponses to the first occurrence of each rime. The

proportion of critical vowel spellings was higher

for the experimental items than the control items

in all six cases, and the results were quite similar

to those found in the analysis of all items. Thus, it

appears that adults generally honor coda-to-vowel

associations in their spelling.

The results of Experiment 1 concur with those

of Treiman and Zukowski (1988) in showing that

adults� spellings of vowels are affected by the


identity of the following consonant. The results do

not support the view that rimes play little or no

role in spelling production and that the weights on

phoneme–grapheme correspondences are derived

from the lexicon as a whole (Barry & Seymour,

1988; Perry et al., 2002). However, our results are

consistent with those of Barry and Seymour and

Perry et al. in showing that the grapheme option

that is overrepresented in a particular rime is not

necessarily produced more often than the gra-

pheme that typically spells the phoneme. With

=ai=, for instance, people produced i plus final e

spellings more often than igh spellings for words

ending in /t/ as well as for other words. Although

our results agree in this respect with those of

Barry and Seymour and Perry et al., our results go

beyond theirs in showing that igh was produced

significantly more often for /aIt/ than for control

rimes. Rime context plays a role in spelling

production.

According to the rime constituency hypothesis,

spellers use associations within the rime unit but

do not go beyond the boundaries of the rime. The

results of Treiman and Zukowski (1988) support

this hypothesis, in that coda-to-vowel but not

onset-to-vowel effects were found in that study.

An alternative view is that adults are sensitive to

the effects of onsets as well as codas on vowel

spelling. The weak results for Case 4 of the present

study could be taken to support this alternative

explanation. This is because the critical oo spelling

of Case 4 tends to occur in real words that have

both a labial onset and a coda /l/, /s/, =S=, or =tS=.Although all of our experimental items had one of

these codas, most did not have a labial onset. That

the results were weaker for Case 4 than for the

other five cases could be taken to suggest that

the onset as well as the coda contributes to the

spelling of the vowel.

Experiment 2 used a design similar to that of

Experiment 1 to determine whether adult spellers

are sensitive to onset-to-vowel associations. Ac-

cording to the rime constituency hypothesis,

spellers do not use onset-to-vowel associations

even when they exist in the writing system because

these associations involve phonemes from differ-

ent constituents of the syllable.

Experiment 2

The purpose of Experiment 2 was to determine

whether adults� spelling of vowels is systematically

affected by the identity of the preceding conso-

nant. Kessler and Treiman (2001) found that as-

sociations between vowels and onsets are less

numerous and less strong overall than associa-

tions between vowels and codas. However, they

identified four cases in which the vowel spelling is

significantly associated with the preceding con-

sonant. The three clearest of these cases were

selected for study here.

The first case of onset conditioning involves

= A=. This vowel is normally spelled as o, as in pod

Table 2

Results of Experiment 1

Case 1: =e= Case 2: /i/ Case 3: /o/ Case 4: =u= Case 5: =au= Case 6: =ai=

Mean (SD) proportion of

critical spellings,

experimental nonwords

.11 (.21) .72 (.31) .23 (.24) .54 (.23) .51 (.24) .27 (.33)

Mean (SD) proportion of

critical spellings, control

nonwords

.05 (.01) .45 (.30) .12 (.12) .43 (.27) .08 (.13) .00 (.00)

p value for difference,

one-tailed t test by subjects

p ¼ :023 p < :001 p ¼ :005 p ¼ :031 p < :001 p < :001

No. of participants (of 22)

showing predicted difference

(+), opposite pattern ()),and tie

7+ 19+ 12+ 11+ 21+ 14+

1) 0) 5) 5) 0) 0)14 tie 3 tie 5 tie 6 tie 1 tie 8 tie

p value for difference,

one-tailed t test by items

p ¼ :039 p < :001 p ¼ :01 p ¼ :08 p < :001 p < :001

No. of item pairs (of 10)

showing predicted

difference (+), opposite

pattern ()), and tie

6+ 9+ 8+ 5+ 10+ 10+

2) 1) 1) 5) 0) 0)2 tie 0 tie 1 tie 0 tie 0 tie 0 tie


and slop. However, it is usually spelled as a after

/w/, as in wad and swan. The monosyllables

studied by Kessler and Treiman (2001) do not

contain any exceptions to this latter pattern, and

the association is in this sense stronger than any of

those studied in Experiment 1. As Table 3 shows,

though, there are some exceptions in the first

syllables of the larger set of words that we inves-

tigated for the present study, including wobble and

wombat. Our second case of onset conditioning

involves =g=. After /w/, this vowel is usually

spelled as or, as in work and worth. Were is a

notable exception to this pattern, and there are a

handful of others, such as whirl. After phonemes

other than /w/, =g= does not often take on a

spelling that begins with o. Instead, it has a variety

of spellings, including ur, ir, and er. Ur is partic-

ularly common after /k/, /bl/, and /sl/, as in curb,

blur, and slur, and these onsets were selected as the

control context for the present study. Case 3 in-

volves /u/. When /u/ is preceded by a noncoronal

consonant (i.e., one that does not have a dental,

alveolar, or palato-alveolar place of articulation),

it usually has a spelling beginning with o. The

most common such spelling is oo, as in food and

spoon. Although there are no exceptions to this

pattern in the monosyllables studied by Kessler

and Treiman, some exceptions occur in the larger

set, including scuba and cuckoo. After coronals, u

followed by final e (e.g., rune), eu (e.g., rheum),

and ew (e.g., blew) are more common, although oo

also occurs (e.g., broom).

Two of the patterns described (Cases 1 and 3)

above are due to sound changes that have oc-

curred in many dialects of English. For example,

the effect of context on the spelling of = A= reflects

the fact that the vowel of words like wad and swan

was originally pronounced the same as the vowel

of pad. The influence of the preceding /w/ even-

tually changed the vowel to = A=, the same vowel

as in pod. Given the conservative nature of the

English writing system, the spellings of the vowels

remained the same. The other effect (Case 2) is due

to spelling conventions. English resists placing u

and w (‘‘double u’’) next to one another, and so

vowels that might normally be spelled with u have

a special spelling next to w (e.g., worm instead of

wurm).

We designed pairs of nonwords to investigate

each of the three cases. If adult spellers are sen-

sitive to onset conditioning, the critical vowel

spelling should be more common in the experi-

mental items than the control items.

Method

Stimuli. For each case, 10 pairs of phonologi-

cally legal experimental and control nonwords

were constructed. The experimental and control

syllables in each pair had different onsets but the

same codas. For example, =skw Anz= (experimen-

tal syllable for Case 1) was paired with =slanz=(control syllable). For Case 1, we used codas that

do not condition the a spelling of = A=. Twenty

filler nonwords were constructed. The fillers used

different vowels from the critical stimuli, and they

included a number of different consonants as

well. A complete list of the stimuli appears in the

Appendix.

For purposes of presentation, three different

random orders were prepared. In each list, the

experimental items, control items, and fillers were

intermixed with the constraint that no more than

two consecutive items had the same onset, vowel,

or coda.

Procedure. The procedure was like that of

Experiment 1, except that no rest break was

provided due to the smaller number of stimuli.

Table 3

Cases in which vowel spelling is affected by onset in the words of English

Case 1: = A= Case 2: =g= Case 3: /u/

Preceding context for experimental nonwords /w/ /w/ Noncoronal consonant

Preceding context for control nonwords Any other consonant /bl/, /k/, /sl/ Coronal consonant

Sample experimental nonword =skw Anz= =wgdZ= /muk/

Sample control nonword =sl Anz= =kgdZ/ =p ruk=

Critical vowel spelling a initial o initial o initial

Proportion real words with critical spelling,

experimental contexta1.00 (.86) .78 (.67) 1.00 (.87)

Proportion real words with critical spelling,

control contexta.09 (.11) .00 (.15) .49 (.30)

a The first value is based on the familiar monosyllabic words from Kessler and Treiman (2001); the second value is

based on the first syllables of familiar words, polysyllabic as well as monosyllabic. See text for details.


The participants were assigned to one of the three

lists in the order in which they were run.

Participants. Twenty-one students contributed

data. The data of one additional participant were

dropped because more than two of this student�sspellings of the 20 filler items were not plausible

renditions of the item�s phonemic structure. The

other participants produced a mean of 0.42 im-

plausible spellings of the filler items.


For Case 1 ð= A=Þ, we tabulated the number of

vowel spellings that began with a for the experi-

mental syllables and the control syllables. Such

spellings should be more frequent for experimen-

tal syllables such as =skw Anz= than for control

syllables such as =sl Anz= if spellers are sensitive to

the influence of the preceding consonant on the

spelling of the vowel. Spellings of the vowel with

au or aw were not counted as critical vowel

spellings, since these spellings could reflect a dia-

lect in which = A= has merged with = c=, which is

normally spelled as au or aw. Such spellings were

uncommon, however, occurring less than 4% of

the time. As Table 4 shows, the critical spellings

were substantially more common for the experi-

mental stimuli than the control stimuli, and the

difference was significant according to t tests by

subjects and by items. All participants showed a

difference in the predicted direction, and all pairs

of experimental and control nonwords did as well.

For Case 2 (=g=), the critical vowel spellings

were those that began with o. As Table 4 shows,

such spellings were significantly more frequent for

the experimental nonwords such as =wgdZ= than

for the control nonwords such as =kgdZ=. Al-

though o spellings were more common for the

experimental stimuli than the control stimuli, u

was the most common type of spelling for both

types of items. E was used almost as often as o for

the experimental nonwords (28% e vs 29% o), but

e was less common for the control nonwords

(15%). Spellers� use of e after /w/ may reflect the

influence of were. The most important result,

though, is that o spellings were significantly more

common for experimental than control nonwords.

For Case 3 (/u/), the critical vowel spellings

were those that began with o. These spellings were

much more common for the experimental non-

words such as /muk/ than for the control non-

words such as =p ruk=. In the great majority of

cases, the particular o-initial grapheme that was

used was oo.

Given that certain onset-vowel sequences were

repeated across the experiment, we examined

participants� spellings for the first occurrence of

each sequence. In all three cases, the proportion of

critical vowel spellings was higher for experimen-

tal nonwords than for control nonwords. The re-

sults were numerically similar to those observed

for all items.

Thus, there is strong evidence that adults�spellings of vowels are influenced by the preceding

consonant. This evidence was found for all three

of the cases that we examined. These results in-

dicate that adults pick up and use onset-to-vowel

associations when they exist in English. These

findings fail to support the rime constituency hy-

pothesis, which predicts that spellers use associa-

tions within the syllable rime but not those that

involve the onset and part of the rime. Under

General Discussion, we consider why the adults of

Experiment 2 were influenced by onsets in the

spelling of vowels, whereas those in the study of

Treiman and Zukowski (1988) were not.

Table 4


Case 1: = A= Case 2: =g= Case 3: /u/

Mean (SD) proportion of critical spellings,

experimental nonwords

.87 (.20) .29 (.31) .87 (.13)

Mean (SD) proportion of critical spellings, control

nonwords

.15 (.13) .01 (.02) .29 (.17)

p value for difference, one-tailed t test by subjects p < :001 p < :001 p < :001No. of participants (of 21) showing predicted 21+ 15+ 21+

difference (+), opposite pattern ()), and tie 0) 0) 0)0 tie 6 tie 0 tie

p value for difference, one-tailed t test by items p < :001 p < :001 p < :001

No. of item pairs (of 10) showing predicted 10+ 10+ 10+

difference (+), opposite pattern ()), and tie 0) 0) 0)0 tie 0 tie 0 tie


The findings of Experiment 2 are surprising in

light of the view that rimes play a special role in

reading and phonological processing in English.

Before considering how to explain these findings,

we thought it important to determine whether the

same sensitivity to onsets appears in a spelling

task involving real words. Experiment 3 was de-

signed to address this issue. It also asked whether

the coda influences adults� spellings of vowels in

real words.

Experiment 3

To determine whether people use consonantal

context when spelling the vowels of real words, we

can look at their errors. If spellers store only in-

formation about the most common spellings of

vowels, then a word like wombat would have the

expected vowel spelling. This is because it uses the

typical grapheme for medial = A=, o. Possum, too,

has the expected vowel. In this view, substitutions

of a for o should be uncommon for both wombat

and possum. However, if spellers store informa-

tion about the spellings of vowels after particular

consonants, then wombat would have an irregular

vowel spelling. This is because the most common

spelling of = A= after /w/ is a. In this view, substi-

tutions of a for o should be relatively common for

wombat, more common than for possum. We

asked whether substitution errors differ in this

way for experimental words like wombat and

control words like possum.

Experiment 3 used the logic described above to

examine both onset-to-vowel and coda-to-vowel

associations. For each case of coda-to-vowel as-

sociation (Table 1) and each case of onset-to-vo-

wel association (Table 3), we selected real words

for which the vowel is not spelled in the critical

manner. Some of these words had the vowel in the

experimental context and an equal number had

the vowel in the control context. If context has an

effect on spelling, then substitutions of the critical

spelling for the correct spelling should be more

common for the experimental words than the

control words.

Method

Stimuli. For each of the cases examined in

Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, we chose as

many words as possible that contained the vowel

in the experimental context and where the vowel

was not spelled in the critical manner. We selected

an equal number of such words that contained the

vowel in the control context. We attempted to

equate the experimental and control words for

frequency, length, stress of the critical vowel, and

conventional spelling of the critical vowel. We

avoided words that had homophones that might

be familiar to our students. Also, we tried to

avoid situations in which use of the critical vowel

would result in a real word. Because the number

of potential stimuli was relatively small, we could

not use an equal number of stimuli in all of the

cases.

For the test of coda-to-vowel associations, the

number of stimuli per case ranged from a low of 2

(1 experimental word and 1 control word) for

Case 4 to a high of 20 (10 experimental words and

10 control words) for Case 3. There were 30 ex-

perimental words and 30 control words. Across

the six cases, the experimental words and control

words were alike in length (mean of 6.2 letters for

both). The experimental words were slightly more

frequent than the control words (33.5 and 28.8,

respectively, according to Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, &

Duvvuri, 1995), but the difference in frequency

was not significant ðp ¼ :75Þ.For the test of onset-to-vowel associations, the

number of stimuli per case ranged from 4 (2 ex-

perimental and 2 control) to 12 (6 experimental

and 6 control). Altogether, there were 12 experi-

mental words and 12 control words testing onset-

to-vowel associations. The experimental and

control words were similar in length (5.5 letters vs

5.4 letters). The experimental words were slightly

but not significantly more frequent than the con-

trols (25.3 vs 19.9; p ¼ :58). All of the words used

in the experiment are listed in the Appendix.

For purposes of presentation, the 84 words

were randomly intermixed with the constraint that

no two words with the same critical vowel were

adjacent. Two different random orders were pre-

pared.

Procedure. The participants were tested indi-

vidually or in small groups. Approximately half of

the participants received the stimuli in each of the

two random orders. The experimenter pro-

nounced each word, said it in a sentence, and then

said the word again. The participants were then

asked to spell the word on prepared answer sheets.

There was a rest break halfway through the list.

Participants. The participants were 35 students

from the same population as in the previous ex-

periments, with the exception that one participant

was a student at a different college in the same

area.



The participants generally found the words

difficult to spell. The mean overall error rate was

27.6% (range 2.4–66.7%). Our primary interest

was in the types of spelling errors made for ex-

perimental words and control words. Specifically,

were participants more likely to substitute the

critical vowel for the correct vowel when spelling

the experimental words than when spelling the

control words? If so, this would indicate that

adults show an effect of context on spelling.

For the coda-to-vowel experimental words,

22% of the errors used the critical vowel spelling

in place of the conventional spelling. For example,

participants sometimes misspelled shred as shread

and casserole as casserol. For the coda-to-vowel

control stimuli, only 8% of the errors used the

critical vowel. That is, errors such as fleak for fleck

and isotop for isotope were relatively uncommon.

As Table 5 shows, the proportion of errors that

used the critical vowel spelling was reliably greater

for the experimental words than the control

words, both by subjects and by items. The re-

maining errors on the experimental and control

words misspelled phonemes other than the target

vowel, as in cassarole and caserole for casserole. In

a few cases, the target vowel was spelled with a

grapheme other than the critical vowel, as in flak

for fleck.

With the onset-to-vowel stimuli, too, spellers

were more likely to use the critical spelling for the

experimental words than the control words. For

the experimental words, 33% of the errors sub-

stituted the critical vowel spelling for the correct

spelling. For example, wok was sometimes spelled

as wak and wombat was sometimes spelled as

wambat. The control stimuli were less likely to

give rise to such errors. For these stimuli, just 5%

of the errors used the critical vowel spelling. Cog

was rarely spelled as cag, for example, and possum

was rarely spelled as passum. Statistical tests,

shown in Table 5, confirmed that the experimental

and control words differed reliably in the pro-

portion of critical errors relative to all errors.

Other errors made by participants misspelled

phonemes other than the target vowel, as in

whombat for wombat, or misspelled the target

vowel with a grapheme other than the critical

spelling, as in possome for possum. The errors were

typically nonwords (86% nonwords pooling over

onset-to-vowel and coda-to-vowel stimuli). Given

that some dictionaries list coocoo as a slang al-

ternative for cuckoo, we also analyzed the results

without this item. The difference between experi-

mental and control words in the proportion of

critical errors relative to all errors was still sig-

nificant (by subjects: p ¼ :001, one-tailed; by

items: p ¼ :023, one-tailed).In light of the small numbers of stimuli for

some of the individual vowels, statistical tests were

not carried out for each case separately. However,

the proportion of critical errors relative to all er-

rors was higher for experimental words than for

control words for Cases 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 of the

coda-to-vowel stimuli and Cases 1–3 of the onset-

to-vowel stimuli. The only case that did not show

a difference in the predicted direction was coda-to-

vowel Case 4, =u=. There was just one experi-

mental word and just one control word for this

case, however. The experimental word, swoosh,

may not be an ideal test because the critical

spelling, u, rarely appears next to w in English.

Because some of the critical rimes and onset-

vowel sequences were repeated within the list, we

examined participants� performance on the first

Table 5


Coda-to-vowel Onset-to-vowel

Proportion (and number) critical errors relative to all errors,

experimental words

.22 (49/225) .33 (54/162)

Proportion (and number) critical errors relative to all errors,

control words

.08 (24/269) .05 (8/155)

p value for difference in proportions, one-tailed t test by subjects p ¼ :004 p < :001

No. of participants (of 35) showing predicted 21+ 26+

difference (+), opposite pattern ()), and tie 7) 1)6 tiea 6 tieb

p value for difference, one-tailed t test by items p ¼ :048 p ¼ :012

aOne additional participant made no errors on coda-to-vowel items.bOne additional participant made no errors on onset-to-vowel items, and another made no errors on onset-to-vowel

experimental items.


instance of a given sequence that they encoun-

tered. The proportion of errors that used the

critical vowel spelling was larger for the experi-

mental items than the control items for both the

coda-to-vowel case and the onset-to-vowel case,

with the results numerically very similar to those

observed for all items.

Participants who were more sensitive to coda-

to-vowel associations (as measured by the differ-

ence in proportion of substitution errors of the

critical vowel on the experimental and control

words) also tended to be more sensitive to onset-

to-vowel associations (r ¼ :61; p < :001, one-

tailed; the results of three participants could not

be included in this analysis because they made no

any errors in one or more of the cells). A com-

bined measure of sensitivity to coda-to-vowel and

onset-to-vowel associations showed a significant

correlation with performance on the spelling test

such that better spellers showed a larger difference

between experimental and control items than did

poorer spellers (r ¼ :29; p ¼ :048, one-tailed; all

participants contributed data to this analysis).

These results suggest that good spellers at the

college level are more responsive to the statistical

patterns that affect vowel spelling than are poorer

spellers.

Are spellers more sensitive to those patterns

for which stronger evidence exists within the En-

glish spelling system itself? Relatively few spelling

patterns were examined in each experiment, and

few examples of some of the patterns were in-

cluded in Experiment 3. Nevertheless, we carried

out exploratory analyses to address this question.

For Experiment 3, we expressed spellers� sensi-

tivity to each pattern in terms of the difference

between experimental and control words in the

proportion of critical errors relative to all errors.

For Experiments 1 and 2, we used the difference

between experimental and control items in pro-

portion of critical spellings. We did not include

the results for coda-to-vowel Case 4, since this

case may also tap onset-to-vowel sensitivity, as

mentioned above. For the combined data from

Experiments 1 and 2, there was a significant

Spearman rank-order correlation between the

strength of the behavioral effect and the strength

of the pattern in the English writing system when

the latter was expressed as the difference in the

proportion of real words with the critical spelling

in the experimental and control contexts. This

held true whether the pattern�s strength was cal-

culated on the basis of the monosyllabic words

from Kessler and Treiman (2001) or on the basis

of the larger word set that was analyzed for the

present study (rs ¼ :73; p ¼ :020, one-tailed, for

the former analysis; rs ¼ :84; p ¼ :005, one-tailed,for the latter analysis). For Experiment 3, where

there were generally fewer items for each case, a

significant rank-order correlation was found when

we used the data from the larger word set

(rs ¼ :71; p ¼ :023, one-tailed). The correlation

did not reach significance using the smaller word

set (rs ¼ :55; p ¼ :080, one-tailed). These results

must be interpreted with caution, as only eight

cases were included in the analyses and because

there are questions about the best way to assess the

strength of a pattern in the writing system.

However, the findings provide initial support for

the idea that spellers are especially sensitive

to those patterns for which strong evidence exists

in the words to which they have been exposed.

To summarize, the results of Experiment 3

support the conclusions drawn from Experiments

1 and 2 and show that the findings generalize to

real words. Adults are sensitive to the effects of

both onset and coda on the spelling of medial

vowels. They use this information when spelling

real words as well as when constructing spellings

for nonwords. With real words, this sensitivity

causes certain vowel substitutions to be more

common in some consonantal contexts than in

other contexts. The results of Experiment 3 do not

support the theory that spellers store a list of the

grapheme options for each vowel that is weighted

by the overall frequency of the graphemes in all

consonantal contexts (Barry & Seymour, 1988).

For some vowels, the weightings vary as a func-

tion of not only the following consonant but also

the preceding consonant.

The results obtained so far provide strong ev-

idence against the rime constituency hypothesis,

according to which spellers notice and use asso-

ciations involving phonemes within the rime but

do not go beyond this domain. An alternative

hypothesis, which is compatible with the results of

Experiments 1–3, is that linguistic boundaries are

not critical at all. In this view, spellers pick up

context-sensitive associations involving adjacent

phonemes and generalize these associations in a

way that is blind to linguistic boundaries. We may

call this hypothesis the adjacency hypothesis. An-

other possibility, which is also compatible with the

results of Experiments 1–3, is that spellers are

sensitive to syllable boundaries in their learning

and use of context-sensitive associations. They do

not go beyond the syllable when applying patterns

like those studied here. This latter hypothesis may


be called the syllable hypothesis. We cannot tease

apart the adjacency hypothesis and the syllable

hypothesis based on the results of Experiments 1–

3 because the relevant context was always in the

same syllable as the vowel in these experiments.

Experiment 4 was designed to distinguish be-

tween the adjacency hypothesis and the syllable

hypothesis. In this experiment, we took a closer

look at coda-to-vowel associations and their ef-

fects on nonword spelling. Consider the associa-

tion between /i/ and following /d/ and /p/ that was

examined in Experiments 1 and 3. In English, /i/

tends to be spelled as ee before /d/ and /p/. It is

more likely to be spelled as ea before other con-

sonants. The results of Experiments 1 and 3 sug-

gest that spellers are sensitive to this association.

However, the stimuli of Experiments 1 and 3 al-

ways had the /i/ and the following /d/ or /p/ within

the same syllable. It is thus not clear whether

membership in the same syllable is critical. To

determine whether it is, Experiment 4 examined

participants’ spelling of /i/ in disyllabic nonwords

such as =S ri0dok= (different syllable, experimental)

and =S ri0gok= (different syllable, control). In syl-

lable division tasks, English-speaking adults gen-

erally place the syllable boundary after the /i/ and

before the following consonant in such cases

(Treiman & Danis, 1988b). This outcome is con-

sistent with linguistic theories of syllabification

according to which the onsets of stressed syllables

are maximized (e.g., Selkirk, 1982). According to

the syllable hypothesis, the syllable boundary

blocks /d/ from selecting ee in =S ri0dok= and ee

spellings should be no more common in =S ri0dok=than in =S ri0gok=. In contrast, the adjacency hy-

pothesis states that the syllable boundary is not

critical. By this hypothesis, the rate of ee spellings

should be higher in =S ri0dok= than in =S ri0gok= even

though the vowel and the following consonant do

not belong to the same syllable in =S ri0dok=.Experiment 4 also included stimuli such as

=S rid0bok= (same syllable, experimental) and

=S rig0bok= (same syllable, control). With such

items, the /i/ and the following /d/ or /g/ are vir-

tually always placed in the same syllable in syl-

labification tasks (Treiman & Zukowski, 1990).

This outcome is consistent with linguistic theories

stating that clusters such as /db/ and /gb/ cannot

belong to the same syllable (e.g., Selkirk, 1982).

The adjacency hypothesis and the syllable hy-

pothesis both predict a higher rate of ee spellings

for =S rid0bok= than for =S rig0bok=. Such a result

would show that the findings of Experiment 1

with monosyllabic nonwords generalize to the first

syllables of disyllabic nonwords. This result would

also forestall the interpretation that a lack of

difference between =S ri0dok= and =S ri0gok= is due to

polysyllabicity rather than to syllable boundaries.

Experiment 4

Method

Stimuli. We selected three of the vowels that

were used in Experiment 1 and constructed di-

syllabic nonwords in which these vowels appeared

in the first syllable and the second syllable was

stressed. There were four types of nonwords,

which varied in position of the syllable boundary

(target vowel and following consonant in same

syllable vs different syllable) and the identity of

the consonant that followed the target vowel

(experimental vs control). To illustrate, consider

the vowel /i/ (Case 2 of Experiment 1). In

=S rid0bok= (same syllable, experimental), this vo-

wel and the following consonant, /d/, are in the

same syllable. In =S rig0bok= (same syllable, con-

trol), the syllable boundary is also between the

two consonants and so /i/ and /g/ are in the same

syllable. In =S ri0dok= (experimental, different syl-

lable) and =S ri0gok= (control, different syllable),

the middle consonant is the onset of the second

syllable. The syllable hypothesis predicts an in-

teraction between context and boundary such that

critical spellings of the vowel are more common in

the experimental context than the control context

in the same-syllable case but not in the different-

syllable case. The adjacency hypothesis predicts a

main effect of context—more critical spellings for

experimental nonwords than for control non-

words—but no interaction with boundary.

We checked whether there are any English

monomorphemic words that our participants

might know that contain the target vowel in an

environment that is very similar to that of the

Experiment 4 stimuli (i.e., target vowel followed

by one or more consonants, followed by a stressed

vowel word-finally). For /i/, the only such words

are clich�ee and Peking, neither of which contains

the critical ee spelling. For =au=, there are no such

words. There are a handful of such words for =ai=,including Taiwan and ideal, but none that use the

critical igh spelling and only one (typhoon) in

which the consonant that follows the vowel is one

of the consonants used in Experiment 4. Thus, if

participants spell =S rid0bok= as shreedboke or

=Saul0wost= as showlwost, their ee and ow spellings


cannot reflect experience with highly similar di-

syllabic words. Instead, such spellings would ap-

pear to reflect generalizations from participants�experience with words such as reed and howl. The

/o/ vowel that was used in Experiment 1 (Case 3)

was not used in Experiment 4 because a number

of disyllabic words that are very similar to the

Experiment 4 stimuli use the critical single o

spelling, such as Colette and hotel. Also, it could

be difficult to differentiate the single o spelling

from the o plus final e spelling in the first syllables

of disyllabic words. Because long or diphthon-

gized vowels appear to be critical for producing

the syllabifications desired here (e.g., Treiman &

Danis, 1988b), we could not use =e= (Case 1 of

Experiment 1) or =u= (Case 4 of Experiment 1) in

Experiment 4.

For each of the three vowels used in Experi-

ment 4, we constructed 8 stimuli of each of the

four types. In addition, there were 20 filler non-

words. The fillers were more complex than those

of the previous experiments in that 12 were

monosyllabic and the other 8 were disyllabic. The

disyllabic fillers had stress on the first syllable so

as to vary the stress patterns of the stimuli in the

experiment. The stimuli are listed in the Appendix.

Three different random orders were prepared

for purposes of presentation. In each, the test and

filler nonwords were randomly intermixed such

that no more than two consecutive stimuli had the

same critical vowel and no more than two con-

secutive stimuli were of the same type.

Procedure. The procedure was like that of

Experiment 1. However, given the complexity of

the nonwords, the experimenter pronounced each

nonword twice before asking participants to re-

peat it. The participants were assigned to one of

the three random orders in the order in which they

were run.

Participants. Twenty-three participants con-

tributed data. The results of four additional stu-

dents were dropped because they produced three

or more implausible spellings of the filler items.

The remaining students produced a mean of 0.87

implausible spellings of the 20 fillers.


Table 6 shows the mean proportions of critical

spellings of each vowel in the four types of non-

words. Analyses of variance were carried out by

subjects and by items using the factors of case,

context (experimental vs control), and bound-

ary type (same syllable vs different syllable).

There was a main effect of case [F 1ð2; 44Þ ¼16:06; F 2ð2; 21Þ ¼ 48:91; p < :001 for both] such

that critical vowel spellings were most common

for /i/, next most common for =au=, and least

common for =ai=. This is the same pattern that

was observed in Experiment 1, although the pro-

portion of critical spellings was in each case lower

than for the monosyllabic nonwords of Experi-

ment 1. The main effect of context was also sig-

nificant [F 1ð1; 22Þ ¼ 17:91; F 2ð1; 21Þ ¼ 16:05;p � :001 for both]. Critically, this main effect was

qualified by an interaction between boundary and

context ½F 1ð1; 22Þ ¼ 16:82; p < :001; F 2ð1; 21Þ ¼11:90; p ¼ :002�. The interaction arose because

there were significantly more critical spellings in

the experimental same-syllable case than in the

control same-syllable case [t1ð22Þ ¼ 5:06; t2ð23Þ¼ 5:26; p < :001, one-tailed for both]. Indeed, 22

of the 23 participants showed a difference in this

direction, as did 19 of the 24 item pairs. In the

different-syllable case, in contrast, there were not

significantly more critical spellings in the experi-

mental context than the control context. The

patterns were similar when we looked at the re-

sults for the first-presented item in each quadru-

plet.

The ANOVAs also showed an interaction

between case and boundary [F 1ð2; 44Þ ¼10:44; F 2ð2; 21Þ ¼ 14:21; p < :001 for both]. For

/i/ and =ai=, there were generally more critical

spellings in the same-syllable cases than in the

different-syllable cases. For =au=, there were more

critical spellings in the different-syllable case.

This is likely because =au= is a syllable-final vowel

in the different-syllable case, and this vowel is

more likely to be spelled as ow when it ends a

syllable (e.g., how and power) than when it is

Table 6

Mean and standard deviation of proportion of critical spellings in Experiment 4

Case 2: /i/ Case 5: =au= Case 6: =ai=

Experimental, same syllable .52 (.34) .25 (.23) .09 (.22)

Control, same syllable .35 (.29) .10 (.18) .00 (.00)

Experimental, different syllable .34 (.32) .28 (.30) .01 (.03)

Control, different syllable .30 (.31) .29 (.29) .01 (.03)


followed by a consonant in the same syllable (e.g.,

mouse).

The finding that participants were more likely

to use the critical vowel spelling in the experi-

mental same-syllable case than in the control

same-syllable case indicates that the results of

Experiment 1 generalize to the first syllables of

disyllabic items with second-syllable stress. These

patterns are not restricted to monosyllabic items

like those of Experiment 1. The obtained differ-

ences do not seem to depend on the items being

highly similar to real words in both segmental

pattern and stress pattern, for the items of Ex-

periment 4 were not very similar to existing words.

The most important result of Experiment 4 is

that spellers appear to use patterns that involve

the syllable rather than patterns that involve mere

adjacency. For example, /i/ and /d/ must be in the

same syllable for an increased number of ee

spellings to be found. Likewise, igh spellings of

=ai= almost never occur unless =ai= and /t/ are in

the same syllable. For =au=, ow spellings seem to

occur in two main circumstances—when =au= is

followed in the same syllable by /l/ or /n/ or when

=au= is at the end of a syllable. For all three

vowels that we investigated, therefore, adjacency

between a vowel and a following consonant does

not suffice for the critical context-conditioned

vowel spelling to occur. What is important is that

the vowel and the following consonant belong to

the same syllable. These results support the syl-

lable hypothesis over the adjacency hypothesis.

Ideally, one would like to disentangle the fac-

tors of adjacency and membership in the same

syllable for contextual associations involving

vowels and preceding consonants as well as for

those involving vowels and following consonants.

This would be difficult to do, however. For ex-

ample, the consonant that conditions several of

the changes examined in Experiment 2, /w/, can-

not occur in syllable-final position in English.

General discussion

Vowels are difficult to spell in English. How

can one choose the correct spelling of a vowel

from among the many possibilities that are offered

by the writing system? This problem provides a

good test case for questions about how language

users deal with irregularity. In the present exper-

iments, we asked how experienced spellers attempt

to solve the vowel problem by examining their

spellings of vowels in nonwords and their subst-

itution errors on vowels in real words. We asked

two specific questions. First, do spellers use the

consonantal context to help narrow the range of

possible spellings for a vowel? Second, what type

of context do spellers use? The answers to these

questions have implications for theories of skilled

spelling production, views of spelling develop-

ment, and other issues.

In answer to first question, we found that

adults� spellings of syllable-medial vowels are af-

fected by the identity of the surrounding conso-

nants. This result suggests that spellers do not

simply store a list of the possible spellings of each

vowel weighted by the frequency of the phoneme-

to-grapheme correspondence in the language as a

whole (Barry & Seymour, 1988). Nor are the

weights affected only by frequency in that partic-

ular position of the syllable, the factor that

Goodman and Caramazza (1986) and Sanders

and Caramazza (1990) examined in studies of

patients whose spelling ability was compromised

by brain damage. In some cases, our results indi-

cate, the graphemes are weighted by their fre-

quency in a specific consonantal environment.

The results thus suggest that spellers use context

as a way of dealing with the difficulties posed by

the English writing system. The findings of Kess-

ler and Treiman (2001) show that the system be-

comes more reliable, statistically, when context is

taken into account. The present results add to this

picture by showing that experienced spellers use

the statistical patterns. Even with these patterns,

the English spelling system is less regular than

many other alphabetic systems. However, the

patterns help to rationalize some spellings that

would otherwise have to be learned by rote.

The second question that motivated the pres-

ent study dealt with the types of context used by

spellers of English. The results of Experiments 1–3

show that the relevant context for a medial vowel

includes consonants from the same constituent of

the syllable—the coda—and consonants from a

different constituent of the syllable—the onset.

However, the results of Experiment 4 indicate that

the following consonant must be within the same

syllable to have an effect, at least for the patterns

studied here. That is, spellers appear to extend the

associations that they have learned in a way that is

sensitive to syllable boundaries. Syllables may

play a role in English spelling if people segment

to-be-spelled items into syllables and spell one

syllable at a time. A slightly different interpreta-

tion is that spellers consider only phonemes in the

same syllable when deciding how to transcribe a


target phoneme. To our knowledge, the present

findings are the first to show a role for syllables in

the spelling of normal adults. However, several

studies have pointed to a role for syllables or

syllable-like units in the recognition of printed

words (e.g., Mewhort & Beal, 1977; Prinzmetal,

Treiman, & Rho, 1986).

Our finding that vowel spelling is influenced by

the onset as well as the coda is surprising on some

interpretations of the view that rimes play a

special role in phonological processing and read-

ing. The present results suggest that people pick

up onset-to-vowel associations when these asso-

ciations exist and that they are as sensitive to

them as to coda-to-vowel associations. To the

extent that rimes play a special role in English

spelling, this may be because associations between

vowels and codas are more numerous in this

writing system than associations between vowels

and onsets (Kessler & Treiman, 2001). This in-

terpretation is consistent with the conclusions of

Martensen, Maris, and Dijkstra (2000), who

found that consideration of the rime unit does not

improve spelling-to-sound predictability in Dutch

and that this unit does not play a special role for

Dutch readers. Martensen et al. suggested that

the characteristics of spelling-to-sound relation-

ships in a particular writing system shape the

units that readers use. Our findings suggest that

the same is true for spelling. In English, spellers

take advantage of associations between onsets

and vowels when these exist. However, associa-

tions between vowels and codas are more influ-

ential overall because the spelling system has

more associations between vowels and codas than

between vowels and onsets. The same may be true

for English reading, but this remains to be

examined.

Recall that Treiman and Zukowski (1988) did

not find a sensitivity to onsets in the spelling of

vowels. For example, their participants rarely

spelled =f reh= as frieth on the basis of friend. Also,

frieth was not rated as a particularly good spelling

of =f reh=. How can we reconcile the lack of an

onset-to-vowel effect in the Treiman and Zukow-

ski study with the substantial onset-to-vowel effect

observed here? An answer is suggested by the fact

that Treiman and Zukowski investigated very

unusual vowel spellings. For example, the ie

spelling of =e= appears only in the word friend.

The onset-conditioned vowel spellings investi-

gated in the present study occur more widely. For

example, = A= is written as a in wad, wan, swan,

swatch, and so on. The present results suggest that

adults are sensitive to onset-to-vowel associations

that appear in a number of different words. In

such cases, they are willing to extend the patterns

to items they have not encountered before. The

results of Treiman and Zukowski suggest, in

contrast, that spellers do not develop generaliz-

able knowledge of onset-to-vowel associations

from single words with unusual spellings like

friend. Having observed that associations between

vowels and codas are more common in English

than associations between vowels and onsets,

adults may sometimes generalize a coda-to-vowel

association from a single word. A single word may

not provide a basis for a generalizable onset-to-

vowel association. When better evidence for an

association between onset and vowel exists, as

with the use of a for = A= in wad, wan, swan,

swatch, and so on, spellers are not restricted by the

onset–rime boundary. This interpretation is con-

sistent with the view described above—that the

role of the rime in English spelling derives from

the fact that the writing system includes more

associations between vowels and codas than be-

tween vowels and onsets.

Our results demonstrate context effects on the

spelling of English vowels, and they show that

these effects can involve the preceding consonant

as well as the following one. An issue that we have

not yet considered is whether the observed con-

textual effects operate on sound-to-letter corre-

spondences or on letters alone. Consider the fact

that =e= has several spellings, including ea and e,

and that participants in Experiment 1 used ea a

higher proportion of the time before /d/ (or its

spelling d) than before /p/ (or its spelling p). We

have assumed that the choice between ea and a

takes into account the phoneme that is being

spelled. However, an alternative hypothesis is that

spellers favor the letter sequence ea more before d

than before p, regardless of the phonemes being

represented. Such a preference could arise if the

proportion of ea spellings in English text is higher

before d than before p and if spellers adjust their

own productions to reflect this. According to this

alternative hypothesis, which we will call the letter

frequency hypothesis, participants may generate

possible spellings of =e= without regard for con-

text and then choose the spelling that yields a

more typical letter sequence. Letter frequency

could well be influential, especially because these

experiments look at a complete spelling that takes

some time to produce.

Our experiments were not designed to tease

apart the two hypotheses discussed above.


However, we conducted a post hoc check by ex-

amining the results for those cases in which the

distributions of spellings in texts do not fit the

patterns expected by the letter frequency hypoth-

esis. For each test vowel in Experiments 1 and 2,

such as =e=, we considered each pair of experi-

mental and control contexts, such as /d/ and /p/.

We chose a priori the expected spellings in those

environments, using the critical vowel spelling and

the other most likely vowel spelling. For each of

the four spellings—ead, eap, ed, and ep in this

example—we counted how often they appear at

the appropriate edges of words in English text,

based on Zeno et al. (1995). Then we computed

whether the proportion of critical vowel spellings

(ea) was higher in the experimental environment

(d) than the control environment (p). If so, the

letter frequency hypothesis could potentially ex-

plain the experimental results. For 68 of the 90

experimental-control pairs in Experiments 1 and

2, the pattern in text fit the letter frequency hy-

pothesis and so the results for these pairs cannot

help in disentangling the two hypotheses. In 22 of

the cases, however, the pattern in text was con-

trary to the letter frequency hypothesis. For =e=,for instance, the proportion in text of ea spellings

out of both ea and e spellings is .05 before d but

.23 before p. For these cases, we looked at re-

sponses that used one of the four predicted

spellings. There were significantly more critical

vowel spellings in the experimental cases than the

control cases [tð21Þ ¼ 4:24; p < :001, one-tailed].

Because this result obtains even for cases where

the frequency of the letter patterns should influ-

ence participants in the opposite direction, some

of the effects in the present study must operate at

the level of sound-to-letter correspondences.

In other instances, the text counts align with

the letter frequency hypothesis and so the

observed effects may operate at the letter

level. Consider the experimental-control pair

=gait=–=gaif= (Experiment 1, Case 6). Word-final

ight is a more common letter sequence than word-

final ite, whereas final ife is more common than

ighf. Indeed, no English word ends with ighf. The

unusual nature of the ighf sequence is sufficient to

explain why the participants in Experiment 1

avoided it. However, a simple view of letter fre-

quency is not sufficient to explain the results of

Experiment 4. Participants in this experiment used

ight more often than ighf when the corresponding

phonemes were in the same syllable, but they did

not use ight more often than ighf when the pho-

nemes were in different syllables. The notion of a

syllable appears to be necessary in order to ex-

plain these results.

Models of the spelling process are less fully

developed and less explicit than models of the

reading process. The present findings provide

some constraints on the form that spelling models

should take and some data that they will need to

explain. One issue that modelers confront is the

architecture of the spelling system. Researchers

such as Barry and Seymour (1988) and Kreiner

and Gough (1990) have espoused a dual-route

view of spelling, similar to dual-route models of

reading. In this view, lexical knowledge and non-

lexical knowledge provide two different routes to

spelling. Within this framework, our results sug-

gest that the mappings used by the nonlexical

route consider the consonantal context in which a

vowel phoneme occurs. They do not represent

only the most common spelling of each phoneme

or the spelling that is most common in that par-

ticular position of the syllable. Single-route mod-

els, based on connectionist principles, are another

possible architecture (e.g., Olson & Caramazza,

1994). To the extent that such models pick up the

statistical regularities in the writing system, they

may account well for human performance. Single-

route models have the potential to explain evi-

dence pointing to a role of analogies in spelling

(e.g., Campbell, 1983). For example, the =g rol= of

Experiment 1 is similar to the real word =t rol=(troll) and people might therefore spell it in a

similar way. However, the disyllabic stimuli of

Experiment 4 were not highly similar to any real

words and yet the same-syllable items in this ex-

periment showed the same pattern of results

found in the experiments with real words. A

simple analogy-based model would have difficulty

explaining the results of that experiment. This and

other models of spelling need to be more fully

developed before they can be clearly distin-

guished.

Modelers also confront the issue of whether

sound-to-spelling conversion is serial (one pho-

neme at a time) or parallel. Our results suggest

that sound-to-spelling translation is not strictly a

phoneme-by-phoneme process. The choice of

graphemes for a given vowel is influenced by the

following context, implying that spellers do not

complete the selection of a spelling for a medial

vowel before they have processed the next pho-

neme. Most likely, our results suggest, other

phonemes from the same syllable are considered

when determining how to spell a particular pho-

neme. This conclusion is of particular interest


given that one of the major models of the non-

lexical route in reading assumes serial, letter-by-

letter processing (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Lang-

don, & Ziegler, 2001).

Models of the spelling process must also con-

front the issue of whether feedback from reading

plays a role in spelling and, if so, how and when.

This issue is analogous to the one of whether

feedback from spelling plays a role in reading, an

issue that has led to some controversy (Peereman,

Content, & Bonin, 1998; Ziegler, Stone, & Jacobs,

1997). As discussed above, our results suggest

that the end result in spelling production can be

influenced by both knowledge of sound-to-spell-

ing translation (a feedforward effect) and knowl-

edge of common letter patterns (a feedback

effect).

Our results have implications for the study of

spelling development as well as for the modeling

of skilled spelling. If experienced spellers attempt

to cope with the challenges posed by the English

writing system by using context that extends be-

yond the single phoneme, then what about less

experienced spellers? One hypothesis is that

spelling development, like reading development,

proceeds from small units to larger units (e.g.,

Frith, 1985). Our results support the idea that

larger units are important in adult spelling pro-

duction, contrary to some previous claims (Barry

& Seymour, 1988; Perry et al., 2002). If these units

become important only for experienced spellers,

then young children should not show contextual

effects of the kinds documented here. Another

hypothesis is that large units, especially rimes, are

used from the beginning of literacy development

(e.g., Goswami, 1988). On this view, contextual

effects should be found in young children. We are

currently carrying out research to address these

questions.

Our results further suggest that care needs to

be taken in classifying words for studies of spell-

ing and reading. The assumption that spellers

transcribe phonemes without regard to context

may have led to problems in some previous work.

For example, Kreiner and Gough (1990) used a

measure of the relative probability of phoneme–

grapheme correspondences that assumed that

spellers consider the spelling options for a pho-

neme in proportion to their frequency in the lex-

icon as a whole. If spellers give most weight to the

options that are appropriate for a particular

consonantal context, however, such a measure

may not be ideal. As another example, Waters,

Bruck, and Malus-Abramowitz (1988) included a

category of words (labeled regular* words) in

their study of third- to fifth-grade children in

which the words had one or more problem pho-

nemes that could be represented by several dif-

ferent graphemes. The researchers expected

children to perform poorly on these words, as

there appeared to be no principled basis for se-

lection of the correct grapheme from among the

several possibilities. However, the children per-

formed better than expected on the regular*

words. The children may have been able to use

statistical patterns of the kind examined here to

boost their performance on these words. For ex-

ample, food was considered to be a regular* word

because /u/ has several possible spellings. How-

ever, oo is by far the most common spelling of /u/

after noncoronal consonant such as /f/, and chil-

dren may not have given serious consideration to

other options.

In other cases, problems may arise because

of an assumption that spellers use rime-based

units but not other large units (Stone, Vanhoy,

& Van Orden, 1997; Ziegler et al., 1997). In

their study of feedback effects in word reading,

for example, Ziegler et al. classified = Ap= as an

inconsistently spelled rime because it may be

spelled as ap (as in swap) as well as op (as in

chop). However, the a spelling only occurs after

w and so the rime may not be inconsistent for

those who are sensitive to this pattern. Measures

of sound–spelling consistency that do not con-

sider onset-to-vowel associations may not pro-

vide an ideal basis for selecting stimuli for

experiments or drawing conclusions about un-

derlying processes.

Our findings also have implications for what

makes some people good spellers and others poor

spellers. Traditionally, differences in spelling

ability have been attributed to differences in vi-

sual memory ability (see Fischer et al., 1985). The

assumption has been that the English writing

system is so irregular and so illogical that the only

way to become a skilled speller is through rote

memorization. However, research has not shown

a clear connection between nonverbal memory

skills and spelling ability (Fischer et al., 1985;

Giles & Terrell, 1997). The results of Experiment

3 provide initial evidence that good spellers at the

college level are more sensitive than poor spellers

to the contextual factors influencing vowel rep-

resentation. That is, good spellers have a higher

degree of linguistic sensitivity than poor spellers

do. The results of Fischer et al. (1985) point to

a similar conclusion. Our results suggest that


differences in linguistic sensitivity are found for

monomorphemic words, not just for the mor-

phologically complex words that were the focus

of the Fischer et al. research. Moreover, our re-

sults point to some of the relevant linguistic di-

mensions.

In our view, research and modeling in the area

of spelling (and in reading) must be based on a

good understanding of the characteristics of the

writing system under study. The finding that the

spelling of English vowels can be systematically

affected by the identity of the surrounding con-

sonants (Kessler & Treiman, 2001) set the stage

for the present demonstration that adult spellers

are attuned to context in their spelling of vowels.

This combination of statistical studies of language

and behavioral work holds promise for studies of

spelling and reading, as for psycholinguistic re-

search more generally. We look forward to further

applications of this approach in the study of more

complex words and in the study of spelling de-

velopment.

Appendix A. Stimuli for Experiment 1

Case 1: eExperimental: kled; g red; st red; ged; gled; jed;hed; ved; kwed; smedControl: kleb; g redZ; st reg; getS; glep; jeb; hek;vep; kweg; smek

Case 2: i

Experimental: S rid; fip; gid; jid; snip; p rid; hip;sk rip; smip; zip

Control: S rig; fih; gim; jið; snim; p rig; hist;sk rih; smið; zist

Case 3: o

Experimental: dwol; g rol; jol; klol; kwol; plol;

skwol; snol; sp rol; wol

Control: dwot; g

rok; jop; klob; kwon; plotS;skwof; snoð; sp roð;wog

Case 4: u

Experimental: SutS; fuS; juS; klus; lutS; hul; sul;

slutS; smul; zul

Control: Suf ; fuf; juf; kluf ; luf ; huk; suf; sluk;

smuf ; zuf

Case 5: au

Experimental: Saul; maul; naul; haun; vaun; zaul;spaul; p raun; b raul; smaun

Control: SaudZ; mautS; naudZ; haus; vaus; zautS;

spaudZ; p raudZ;b rautS; smautS

Case 6: ai

Experimental: d rait; glait; g rait; gait; jait; hait;

stait; zait; p rait; pait

Control: d raib; glaib; g raiv; gaif ; jais; haif; staib;

zaif ; p raib; paif

Fillers

his; f r

ip; des; fesk; gl�h; h rVd; h c

if; g

crb; flVn;

naið; S

c

in; splaut; jit; S rig; zeb; skent; v�sp;

g

r�k; d c; spV¢

Stimuli for Experiment 2

Case 1: A

Experimental: skw Anz; kw Ats; kw Abd; w Abd;

tw An; w AdZ; skw Amp; kw AtS; kw Ap; gw At

Control: sl Anz; k r Ats; kl Abd; t r Abz; gl An; bl AdZ;n Amp; fl AtS; bl Ap; k r At

Case 2: g

Experimental: wgdZ; wgp; wgtS; wgg; wgS;wgf; wgb; wgn; wgpt; wghtControl: kgdZ; kgp; kgtS; kgg; kgS; blgf ; slgb;

blgn; kgpt; kghtCase 3: u

Experimental: budZ; guh; muk; hus; hun; sput;skudZ; smud; swu; muhControl: fludZ; S ruh; p ruk; klus; plun; S rut; f rudZ;

flud; plu; ðuhFillers

bis; b r

ip; dek; feg; fl�h; gVd; hob; k crb; lVn;

maið; p c

in; splau; rit; Sig; seb; snep; t�sp; t rok;v c; zV¢


Coda-to-vowel associations

Case 1, experimental: shred, bled, moped

Case 1, control: fleck, wretch, trek

Case 2, experimental: centipede, mead, plead, reap,

impede, stampede

Case 2, control: academe, ream, sheath, bequeath,

blaspheme, theme

Case 3, experimental: cajole, camisole, casse-

role, console, Creole, dole, oriole, parole, shoal,

tadpole

Case 3, control: abode, anecdote, isotope, cy-

clone, microbe, lobe, antidote, corrode, croak,

diode

Case 4, experimental: swoosh

Case 4, control: nook

Case 5, experimental: afoul, pronoun

Case 5, control: vouch, slouch

Case 6, experimental: contrite, extradite, finite,

ignite, parasite, smite, sprite, termite

Case 6, control: confide, pesticide, capsize, entice,

diatribe, fife, snide, chastise

Onset-to-vowel associations:

Case 1, experimental: wok, wombat, whopper,

wonk

Case 1, control: cog, possum, nozzle, pomp

Case 2, experimental: whir, whirlpool

Case 2, control: blurt, kerchief


Case 3, experimental: Budapest, cuckoo, Fuji,

guru, scuba, Buddha

Case 3, control: jubilant, sushi, Juneau, judo,

sumo, frugal


Case 2, /i/

Experimental, same syllable: =S rid0bok=; =snip0n c

i=;

=hip0neb=; =sk rip0t A

ud=; =smip0n A

us=; =zip0nef=;=klid0l c

i=; =ip0dek=Control, same syllable: =S rig0bok=; =snim0n c

i=;

=hig0neb=; =sk rih0t A

ud=; =smið0n A

us=; =zim0nef=;=klih0l c

i=; =ig0dek=Experimental, different syllable: =S ri0dok=; =sni0p c

i=;=hi0peb=; =sk ri0p A

ud=; =smi0p A

us=; =zi0pef=;=kli0d c

i=; =i0pek=Control, different syllable: =S ri0gok=; =sni0m c

i=;

=hi0geb=; =sk ri0h A

ugd=; =smi0ð A

us=; =zi0mef=;=kli0h c

i=; =i0gek=

Case 5, =au=

Experimental, same syllable: =Saul0wost=;

=zaul0wug=; =spaul0winh=; =smaun0leb=;=faun0lib=; =aun0lef=; =laun0luf=; =graun0l�sp=

Control, same syllable: =SaudZ0wost=; =zautS0wug=;=spaudZ0winh=; =smautS0leb=; =fautS0lib=;=audZ0lef=; =lautS0luf=; =graudZ0l�sp=

Experimental, different syllable: =Sau0lost=;=zau0lug=; =spau0linh=; =smau0neb=; =fau0nib=;=au0nef=; =lau0nuf=; =grau0n�sp=

Control, different syllable: =Sau0dZost=;=zau0tSug=; =spau0dZinh=; =smau0tSeb=; =fau0tSib=;=au0dZef=; =lau0tSuf=; =grau0dZ�sp=

Case 6, =ai=

Experimental, same syllable: =glait0n A

us=;

=g rait0k A

S=; =zait0p A

ugd=; =st rait0lef=; =S rait0mis=;

=jait0fug=; =klait0n An=; =dZait0keb=Control, same syllable: =glaib0n A

us=;=g raiv0k A

S=; =zaif 0p A

ugd=; =st raiz0lef=;=S raif 0mis=; =jaib0fug=; =klaib0n An=; =dZaif 0keb=Experimental, different syllable: =glai0t A

us=;=g rai0t A

S=; =zai0t A

ud=; =st rai0tef=; =S rai0tis=;=jai0tug=; =klai0t An=; =dZai0teb=Control, different syllable: =glai0b A

us=; =g rai0v A

S=;

=zai0f A

ud=; =st rai0zef=; =S rai0fis=; =jai0bug=;=klai0b An=; =dZai0feb=

Fillers

=0bintE=; =0t r�b=; =0tipko=; =0puk=; =0fegis=;

=0g�nid=; =0pl AksE=; =0flVn=; =0wikEl=; =0p�sk=;

=0gimbE=; =0lVh=; =0mul=; =0dil�b=; =0ikin=;

=0est�k=; =0p�do=; =0S rV¢=; =0tivEt=; =0k r Ab=

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Documents

Context sensitivity in the spelling of English vowelsq